Twitter for Business : Pros and Cons

I’m doing some research on using twitter as a marketing tool to present to some folks. I’ll post my findings after I have given the presentation but until then, here are some initial pros and cons for businesses thinking about using twitter.

Pros

• Free!
• Global reach
• Quick communication with followers and public time line
• Large user base and growing : Comscore shows page views growing from 10 to 20 million between February and March.
• Ages 17 – 45 / early adopters and web savvy users
• Free publicity – Can’t Beat That! Currently anyone with a computer/mobile and access to the internet can join and post what ever they want
• Customizable. Certain features of the page can be made to look like your brand, product, and or company
• Great for SEO! Crawled by search engines which puts more links out that lead to user to your site.

Cons

• Uptime? Downtime?
• Possibility of being blocked by users if you are viewed as a “spammer”
• No moderator which means your messages will be public unless you block them, which defeats the purpose if you are trying to reach users in your demo who you are unaware of on the system. That also means the posts of anyone you follow out of courtesy will appear on your page.
• Customer Service nightmare!! If users are customers, they may use twitter as a way to alert the company to service issues or complaints with your products and or services. And depending on the type of product/service you are marketing, laws will need to be followed when addressing complaints.

More pros and cons to come.

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